101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

112 101 Myths of the Bible
two kingdoms, Israel in the north and Judah in the south. The Bible presents a confusing
picture about which tribes belonged to which kingdom, raising some serious
questions about whether there ever was such an entity as the Twelve Tribes. Some portions
of the Bible, especially the Song of Deborah in the Book of Judges, cast substantial
doubt on whether all the tribes can be traced to a common ancestor.
This is not to say that some sort of Israelite confederation didn’t exist or that at
some point in time it didn’t consist of twelve political entities. The evidence, however,
is that whatever these political entities were, they did not spring from a common patriarchal
relationship.
While it used to be almost universally taken for granted that the Patriarchs and the
sons of Israel where historical figures and that Genesis mixed some basic historical
truths with a variety of legends, a growing segment of the scholarly community now
accepts that the patriarchal stories may have no historical core at all.
At the same time, while the J, E, and P sources frequently can be separated from
each other, they also seem to share some common traditions and themes from earlier
sources. Often, the differences involve only a matter of emphasis or tinkering with
details, such as where an event occurred. In this part of the book, we will look at a number
of the stories in the patriarchal and tribal history and show the mythological
sources that lay behind them. One of the most important of these sources was the
Egyptian Osiris cycle, which provided a significant literary framework for both the
patriarchal history and the later stories about the Exodus. For a more expansive and
detailed look at how the Osiris myths influenced the patriarchal and Exodus histories,
see my earlier work, The Bible Myth.
The Osiris Cycle
The Osiris cycle formed the core of Egypt’s most important religious beliefs, particularly
about the afterlife. The cycle can be divided into two portions. The first concerns
the stories about how the god Set killed his brother Osiris in order to become
king of Egypt; the second concerns the efforts of Set to stop Osiris’s son Horus from
succeeding his father to the throne. The two portions probably originated as separate
and independent myths.